Tours enters the memoir as a refuelling stop abruptly transformed into a site of danger. On June 13, 1940, the narrator landed there while returning to base from a bombing mission; an attack on the airfield wounded him in the leg and left a small piece of lead in his thigh. The episode gives the town a sharply defined place in his wartime story: not a destination or extended setting, but the point where an ordinary pause in flight became a lasting bodily mark.

A Refuelling Stop Under Attack

The narrator was flying a Bloch-210 as the front was collapsing. He had landed at Tours to refuel when Heinkels and Junkers bombed the airfield. He describes the wound as not serious, but the sudden attack interrupted the practical routine of returning from a mission and made the airfield a place of immediate exposure to the war.

The Wound That Remained

The narrator chose not to have the fragment removed and says that he became attached to it. Its persistence carries the Tours episode beyond the brief landing: the injury remained with him after the attack and could still be pointed to later. When his mother warned that he would have to do much more fighting, he reminded her that he had already been wounded and showed her the place in his leg. Tours thus returns indirectly in a later exchange, through the physical trace of the earlier event.

Narrative Significance

The memoir gives Tours significance through this compact sequence of arrival, attack, injury, and remembrance. The retained fragment makes a specific moment of the 1940 campaign part of the narrator’s continuing experience, while his imagined pride in his mother’s response gives the wound a personal dimension as well as a military one. The town’s role is brief, but the mark acquired there recurs as evidence of what he had already endured—and of the fighting he believed still lay ahead.